I was an active duty serviceman stationed in Massachusetts, and my wife, living there only because of my service, wanted to go to college. It seems wrong that Massachusetts denied her in-state tuition as a spouse of the American military, but offers it to illegal immigrants. Why do liberal states do that?

Women shall be forced to buy condoms for their male employees or else we shall put them in prison. If you purchase a large sized soda...we shall put you in prison. No health insurance? Prison !!!

And if you want to put your little boy up for adoption....we'll force you to let two gay guys have him. You resist? We'll put you in prison. Any preacher who feels it wrong to marry gays...STRAIGHT TO PRISON !!

You Republicans better learn....WE DEMOCRATS ARE IN FULL CONTROL !!

We will grow the income (tax revenue) coming into government
We will grow the size of government
We will grow the power of government
UNTIL IT CONTROLS EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR LIFE !!!!!!!!!

Oddly enough this article does not mention that the big tax increase measure (the 'fair shares" increase income tax measure) lost overwhelmingly in California - what passed was an increase in the Sales Tax (hardly a "social justice" thing).

Even increases in the Sales Tax were voted down in such States as South Dakota.

As for what the article calls "shameless" measures supported by "business and rich individuals" in California - you appear to be pointing at a measure (defeated by a 75 million Dollar union campaign - and by the election tide of Barack Obama) to stop unions spending endless sums of their (COMPULSORY) members money on politics.

The Economist pretends to be a "free market" supporting magazine - but articles like this one show what the Economist magazine staff are really like.

Paradoxically, the same-sex marriage referendum successes reinforce the interpretation that a “favourable” Supreme Court decision would be – for the gay community - “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”.

Proposition 8 in California was passed by a tiny majority and – based both on recent opinion polling and on the recent referendum successes – would probably be overturned if another vote were called. As The Economist has observed, public opinion is moving steadily in favour of same-sex marriage.

If matters were allowed to proceed democratically, the gay community would gain the unparalleled legitimacy of having a right to marriage confirmed by a direct vote of fellow citizens.

But a “favourable” Supreme Court decision will mean that that can never happen. A “favourable” decision will mean that there can never be another vote. A “favourable” decision will mean that there can never be any public display of community acceptance.

Whatever jesuitical arguments the judges put forward to justify their intervention, it will be seen for what it is: a political decision imposed by an unelected elite.

Especially if the decision is not unanimous, anti-gay activists for decades to come will be able to talk about “judicial legislation”. They will be able to claim that the gay community was given special treatment by judicial oligarchs overturning the “true wishes” of the People. They will perpetuate the whole “gay issue” with anti-gay campaigning in an effort to have the decision reversed or watered down.

Look at the legacy of Roe v Wade, more than 30 years after the event.

Far and away the most effective way to silence detractors would be to have the matter put to a vote (or where necessary another vote) so that they can be seen publicly and unequivocally not to have the support of the rest of the community. The evidence from this week’s referendums points to the ever increasing likelihood of such a vote being successful.

But the ill-advised intervention of the judiciary will mean that the gay community loses – and loses for all eternity – the opportunity to have a right to marriage confirmed by the direct vote of fellow citizens, and the opportunity to silence detractors once and for all. For the gay community, it will indeed be “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”.

Look at Brown vs. Board of Education or any other major supreme court case. Our founding fathers created a system of checks and balances because there is a fine line between "mob rule" and democracy. The supreme court acts as our nation's constitutional court. The supreme court throughout our history has acted to prevent the worst of the "tyranny of the majority" throughout our history. From ruling against the forced removal of Native Americans by President Jackson (a.k.a "the trail of tears"), to the desegregation and removal of Jim Crow laws in the south.
If you talk to most gay rights activists (or really any civil rights activists for any minority in the most general sense of the word) they say that winning through a referendum is not what they would prefer to do because in essence it is saying that something they believe is a right / is a right for straight people (or whatever the majority) has to be put to a popularity contest. In essence, why do they have to convince a majority of people for the ability to do something that the majority of people can already do. If done by referendum it also suggests that those same rights are just as easily removed by referendum if the majority so chooses.

Equivocation arises when a word with a well-understood meaning in one context – often a meaning with a strong emotional content – is applied in a different context in which that meaning cannot sensibly apply, or in which it can be made to apply only by creating a useless tautological proposition.

In this case the word “right” has two distinguishable meanings which some people conflate, either because they themselves are confused thinkers or because they are trying to lend a spurious objectivity to their beliefs:

- first, the word “right” has a positive sense of “an enforceable preference”, where the choice of which preferences are to be enforced is (in some cases) vested in the judiciary; and

- secondly, the word “right” has a normative sense of “such-and-such ought to be an enforceable preference” .

Whether or not a right exists in the positive sense is something that may be determined empirically by submitting the matter to the judiciary and seeing which outcome the judges prefer.

When those who prefer a judicial solution claim that only a judicial solution can create a “right”, what are they saying? Is it:

a) “only preferences enforced by judges are preferences enforced by judges”; or

b) “preferences enforced by judges are the only way of creating ‘preferences that ought to prevail’”.

The first interpretation is a hollow tautology. The second is a Fallacy of Equivocation: it attempts to carry the positive sense across to the normative sense so as to portray their own preferences as having some objective superiority. Instead of saying, “I believe that this preferences ought to prevail”, it is more satisfying to suggest (by equivocation) that, “It is an objective fact that this preference ought to prevail.”

But it’s a fallacy.

Whichever outcome the black robed lawyers sitting in their magnificent building may prefer, it is still only a subjective preference!!

As the famous judge Learned Hand remarked (emphasis added):

"[Judges] wrap up their veto in a protective veil of adjectives such as 'arbitrary', 'artificial', 'normal', 'reasonable', 'inherent', 'fundamental', or 'essential', whose office usually, though quite innocently, is to disguise what they are doing and impute to it a derivation far more impressive than their personal preferences, which are all that in fact lie behind the decision. . .

"If we do need a third chamber it should appear for what it is, and not as the interpreter of inscrutable principles.”

If “the rights which ought to prevail” had an objective existence, one might presume that the “interpreters of inscrutable principles” would interpret that existence or non-existence consistently.

But they do not!

simdon76 referred to the famous case of Brown vs Board of Education. But as anyone having even a passing familiarity with United States constitutional law knows, the black-robed lawyers in Brown vs Board of Education were merely overturning a political doctrine (“separate-but-equal”) that had itself been invented by another group of black-robed lawyers half a century earlier in Plessy vs Ferguson (in which only one judge dissented) precisely in order to neuter the Fourteenth Amendment and allow racial discrimination to continue.

The very fact that different black-robed lawyers at different times – or even different lawyers on the same case - arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions as to existence or non-existence indicates either:

i) that “rights which ought to prevail” do not exist in a positive sense; or

ii) if they do exist in a positive sense then the interpreters are unable to ascertain their existence in any consistent manner.

If same-sex marriage is a “right which ought to prevail” in an objective sense (as the equivocators would have us believe), then when did that objective existence spring into being. Apparently it didn’t exist in 1900. It didn’t exist in 1985. Is it like some quantum particle which can appear out of nowhere?

There is another interpretation of simdon76’s argument which is less charitable.

Rather than being victims of confused thought, the advocates of judicial imposition may actually prefer not to have the support of the community. The less charitable interpretation is that they actually prefer the decision to be imposed on the Stinking Masses against their will so as to demonstrate who wields Power in the Land.

Of course, such demonstration of power does nothing to establish objectively which “rights ought to prevail”. It is just a demonstration of who now wields the political power to have Supreme Court judges implement the policies they prefer.

But one hopes that nobody would be so small-minded as to be motivated by that.

LEGITIMATE CONSERVATIVE BELIEFS DON'T HAVE TO BE ENDANGERED IN THE U.S.!!

A conservatism rooted in Christian principles and authentic family values is not nessessarily endangered in the U.S...

... provided that U.S.'s individual states' versions of conservatism are ones where ALL of God's children- not just heterosexuals- are guaranteed equal rights under civil laws... including the right to marry the adult person of their choice regardless of gender...

Gedankenexperiment or thought experiments have a rich history in physics and philosophy and can be a lot of fun. The method is to look at ideas and consider consequences.

It can be demonstrated using a really bad political idea. Assume the following: People who get stuff stolen, i.e., victims of theft, get a mandatory nine month sentence of daily physical abuse, a life threatening beating at the end of the nine months and survivors shall have their income and freedom limited for at least the next 16 years.

Proposing policies, programs and legislation based on such nonsense is more likely to win candidates special long sleeved jackets buckling in back than election to public office. Certain varieties of Sharia law require a thief’s hand be cut off; harsh but at least the offender is punished, not the offended.

Ideological overreach infects all political parties when zealotry displaces conviction and is cured by time in the wilderness. The idea that people get to make their own decisions is at the heart of responsibility and is long overdue for resurgence.

There used to be an easy going, tolerant, libertarian leaning strain of politics common to both parties in the Mountain West. There are acres of fertile ground to re-grow this attitude in the scorched earth separating today’s hyperbolic partisan trench warriors.

WA is not representative of all of the US. Gay marriage and marijuana passed the ballot measures in WA state because WA is one of the bluest states in the union. Similar measures would not pass with such ease outside of the solid blue states in the West, Northeast and perhaps Minnesota.

On behalf of all readers, I thank you for your brilliant insight. The fact that there are socially conservative states in these United States is truly breaking news that I, nor TE I'm sure, had yet considered while covering an article about personal freedom breakthroughs.

The real unknown is whether Washington and Colorado's increased tax revenue from marijuana sales will be large enough to persuade less liberal, (yet cash-strapped) states to experiment with loosening their own laws. I obviously hope that is the case. As someone relatively close to the continuing violence of the drug "cartels", one would think that you would hope for federal legalization as well.

Kind of interesting to see where the tipping point is between principles and cold, hard, cash. Just like in my city where all the business people are against taxes except extending the city sales tax, part of which goes into a fund for them.

However, colorado is very evenly split and we still went for the marijuana vote.

I see these two as issues both conservatives and liberals can agree on. For conservatives in involves getting government out of people's personal decisions. For liberals it is the right thing to do. I have always wondered why teh GOP is against these things it seems very un-republican.

Two points:
First: Four states stuck two fingers up to Mr Obama, in effect, by
This is unintelligible to most americans and should be explained by a parenthetical clause. Eg: Stuck two fingers, Britain's version of the finger,
Secondly, it is baffling that it is the conservatives who are in favor of the government limiting the right of free association and freedom to do to ones body as one pleases. One thinks of conservatives as being against government intrusion but here they have made a deal with the devil. The devil being poorly educated rural moralizing religious bigots.

I think that Damn Dirty Ape is in his second point confusing conservatives and libertarians. I cannot define "conservative" very well, but there is a definite movement there and it overlaps libertarianism only incidentally.